20180826 River Trails in Columbus, OH to get RR Bridges

I have written about some of the RR bridges in downtown Columbus, OH. But because Google broke the author's keyword search function on April 3, 2018, it is too much work for me to find the bridge postings now. When I had studied the RR bridges, I noticed some trails might allow some nice closeup shots of the bridges. So when I went to a volleyball tournament in Columbus, I stayed an extra night so that I could hike the trails.

20180826 4204

Sometimes it is nice when my plans get screwed up by a road closure. In this case, I ended up in the parking lot of Hofbrauhaus Columbus. Each tank is labeled with a different type of beer.

I went inside to go to the restroom before I started my walk on the river trails. They have a couple of copper kettles behind the bar. Note the stainless steel pipes that connect the bar to the stainless steel tanks that are on the outside. I confirmed that their taps get beer from a tank, not a keg.

 The pipes go over the gift shop and out of the building.

When I left, I saw they had even more tanks on another side of the building.

This is a decoration that they had out by Goodale Blvd. The front door is not by the street, it is on the other side facing the parking lot. But it is recessed so I missed it when I left the parking lot. But they do have a sign on their Goodale side saying "Not the Front Door."

 After leaving Hofbrauhaus Columbus, I headed east on Goodale. CSX had done very little maintenance on this overpass. Note the handrail still has decorations. And it probably still has lead paint because you can see some of the letters for Chesapeake of the Chesapeake & Ohio name.

And there has been some noticeable spalling of the concrete. I can't believe there are just two longitudinal girders per track. I wonder if there are some longitudinal girders in the middle above those cross members. Below shows that BNSF used several longitudinal girders for each of the three tracks at the Belmont overpass.

20141011 0299

Oh boy, I'm getting close to a truss bridge. Once again, I'm reminded that it is easier to get photos of things when there are no leaves on the trees. Parts of the truss are peaking out between the leaves.

At least the trail gives me a clear view of the end of a truss. This truss bridge is part of the route that has the C&O overpass we saw above. It is now CSX.

(location) This is a truss bridge rather than a steel girder bridge, so it makes sense that the depth and number of the longitudinal girders is small. Note that there is a steel girder bridge on the right.

(location) Obviously, I'm now under the steel girder bridge and the truss bridge is on the left. Again, now that I'm looking at the photos, I'm surprised that we don't see more longitudinal girders. I realize now that I should have taken a photo straight up to see if I could find girders above the cross members. According to my 2005 SPV Map, this route used to be Pennsy and is now Norfolk Southern.

A close up of a truss, which allows the camera to compute a better exposure. It is a Warren Truss with vertical members.

I'm trying my best to find a view of the girder bridge through the trees that lined the river bank.

 Still trying.

Looking back along the trail where I had walked.

Further downstream, there was not a fence along the trail and someone (fishermen?) made a tunnel through the trees. So I walked down to the river. The river was evidently running low because I was able to walk across some gravel beds. Note that sometimes the water runs deep enough here to have jammed tree trunks against the tree on the left.

I walked upstream trying to find a bigger gap in the trees.

This was as far into the river bed that I was willing to go. I see there is a road bridge peaking through to the left of the pier for the truss bridge. That would be Goodale Blvd.

On my way back out from the river bed, I took a photo of the "tunnel" through the trees that allowed me to access the river.

(location) The reason I took this photo was to capture the expansion gap in the ramp. And because the big I-670 bridge over the ramp bridge was kinda neat. It was rather hot (90+ degrees) when I took this photo. I wonder how much wider the gap is in the winter when the girders would have contracted because of the colder weather.

I was trying to get the tall piers of I-670 along with the piers for the ramp. In hindsight, I should have concentrated on the high I-670 piers. I deliberately minimized the white gap between the bridges to improve the exposure computation. The underside of I-670 is one of the best below deck exposures I have obtained. I wonder why they built the wide road so high and the narrower roads are lower. Most interchanges build the ramps above the main road. Unlike Chicago, the river is not navigable and the Coast Guard would not have specified a minimum height. (In Chicago, it is 60' for the Interstate highway. For some of the older railroad lift bridges, it was even higher.)

There is an egret just to the left of the branch sticking out in the middle of the photo. I quick grabbed this shot for fear it would fly away.

But it turned out that I had plenty of time to get a photo of the egret. I was on the trail during a Sunday afternoon, and there were quite a few bicyclists using it. Some of them were going pretty fast. So if the egret is used to that commotion, me standing on the trail is obviously no big deal. Plus the width of the river makes the distance between the bird and me much larger than when I spot a bird in the I&M Canal.

A closer view of the bird and the rapids.

I'm now out on the US-33 bridge even though it has no shoulder, let alone a sidewalk, looking upstream. We can see that Paddle in the City evidently has some business.

Looking downstream I see where the next RR bridge is and part of the downtown.

But the reason I'm on the bridge is to get around the trees on the near shore and get a shot of this smokestack. Note all of the power lines.

Turning around and looking the other direction I see this big steel pole that turns the wires 90-degrees...

 ...so that they can head south. I suspect that the high voltage lines were added rather recently to bring electricity into the city and that the power plant has been shut down.

(location) I'm on a pedestrian bridge that takes a branch of the trail across the river. In addition to the smokestack, we can now see the power generating building and part of the switch yard.

(new window)

I switched back to photos fast enough that I caught part of the engines. It appears that once again a cloudy sky is messing up the camera's white balance computation. Or do I need to learn something else about my Nikon D3200?

It looks like a loaded CSX coal train.

I watched the train a while until...

...I was convinced that it was a unit coal train.

There is a white egret on the right in the water and a dark egret on the left on the gravel.

I took a wider angle to note that, once again, an egret was near a rapids. It also occurred to me that the river in the right background is the Scioto River. I have been walking along the Olentangy River. I'm looking at where the Olentangy flows into the Scioto.

(new window) "The train I saw on a river bridge, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkJ8M..., seems to be all hoppers and seems to be moving faster. Again, the reason for taking a short video instead of photos is because that is the easiest way to record the speed of the train. And because the movement of the cars helps you spot them in among all of the trees."

A full view of the switchyard and the transmission lines that are probably now feeding the local distribution lines that used to be fed by the power station.

Clean Fuels Ohio using an office building near here and vacant land instead of a coal pile are other indications that this plant has been shut down. Or at least converted to gas. In the winter, you can tell if a plant is running because a water vapor plume comes out of the smokestack. But the EPA got rid of black smoke pretty soon after it was created. It has been working on other emissions such as sulfur, mercury, CO2, etc. since then.

No motorized vehicles are allowed unless you are a park ranger.

This is a newer paint job than the C&O one we already saw. But is it new enough to use lead-free paint?

Someone cut an access lane through the trees that lined the trail. This is the bridge that carried the CSX train that we saw in the videos above.

Looking the other direction.

The trail goes down below the RR bridge.

I grabbed a shot with some bicyclists near the bridge to help provide scale for the bridge. I blocked out the faces to preserve privacy. And I do mean "grab." They were moving rather quickly.

(location) It appears that CSX's idea of fixing spalling is to pick it up and pile it under the bridge. In the bridge bearings, I wonder which plane surface slides. I would expect it to be able to slide to and away from the abutment, but not side-to-side. It's not clear to me how that design achieves that one degree of movement.

After walking past the embankment wall, it occurred to me that I could go up the hill on the other side of the wall and have some really nice views of this bridge.

I think the racks on the side carried signalling (code) lines before the train signalling technology switched to using fiber optic cables.

A detail of the end since I was right there.

While I was on the hill, I took a photo of the next RR bridge that is downriver.

Now I'm back on the trail grabbing views when I find a gap in the treeline.

A drain into the river gave me a bigger gap in the treeline.

Perhaps some flowers in the foreground makes it a better photo. Once again, I need to play with Gimp to see if it can help with buildings against white clouds.

Then I came to North Bank Park Pavilion, which has cleared out the trees along the river bank.

The bridge is long enough that I could not get the whole thing in one shot with the lens set at 18mm. Clearly, these two spans are newer than the other three. Since the old spans rest on cut-stone piers and these two rest on a concrete pier, I assume the previous spans failed because the pier failed. It is interesting that this pier is the one that failed. A 3D Satellite view confirms that this pier is on the inside of a curve in the river. Normally, the current is faster on the outside edge of a curve and would be more likely to scour the base of the pier.

A detail of one of the original spans.

All three of the older spans.

Looking back upstream, this is the bridge we saw the train on.

There is another RR bridge further downstream, but I didn't have a water bottle and my body had been sore since before I saw the power plant. So I headed back up to street level to go back to the van and took this "fairwell" shot that includes the trail.

Given the expression "no pain, no gain," I had better have gained something on this trip. Fortunately, the soreness was a general muscle soreness, and it did not get much worse during the last three-fourths of the walk. I was surprised, and disappointed, how quickly I got sore.

This is the NS/Pennsy route over Neil Avenue. This overpass is certainly well maintained.

I don't know if the overpass was rebuilt or just painted. It does appear the bridge abutment has been rebuilt. I can see additional longitudinal girders above the cross members in this view.

In fact, the overpass has been so recently "painted" that there are drippings all over the sidewalk and street. I put the word painted in quotes because my experience is that paint doesn't create long splats like that when it hits the ground. The shapes remind more more of tar-like droppings.

The sign on the left says "TO GOODALE." Thank goodness I was walking and thus going slow enough to be able to see and read this sign. It saved me some steps.

The underside of I-670 as seen from Vine Street. It looks like concrete girders to me.

They had several crews working around town to take advantage of almost no traffic downtown during a Sunday. Although I had to wait a while to walk out in the street past that sidewalk repair because there was a significant line of cars streaming by just when I needed to use the street. Murphy's Law in action.

They raised the bed of the truck so that the excavator could scoop asphalt right out of the truck.

I wonder if the almost 90-degree bend in the boom is to help it work under bridges but still have a good reach.

They added a whole separate bridge for the trail to cross the river and OH-315.

Closely packed road bridges are upstream. Looking at a map, these are various ramps between OH-315 and local roads.

But that separate bridge prevents you from crossing Goodale when you spot the RR bridge on the other side. So I backtracked, crossed the road to the south side, and got this view of the first RR bridge I saw on the trail.

When you get over the trail and...

...OH-315 they erect a chain link fence with the smallest holes I have ever seen. I guess they want to make sure that any rock or other "mischief" (vandalism) shoved through the fence

This is the other side of the first overpass we saw. I can see the words "AND" and "OHIO" on this side.

I took this photo to record the vertical clearance of 13' 9", which was probably pretty high when this bridge was built.

When I got back around 1pm, I went in the Hofbrauhaus Columbus to eat. They were still serving a brunch menu. I had a nice ham, Swiss cheese and egg croisant sandwich with a side of fruit. And the bowl of fruit was large. The amount of fruit surprised me because the price was rather cheap. There was also live entertainment. But I didn't care about the entertainment because they had wireless so I read the Chicago Tribune on my laptop while I ate.